Middlesex News 3/14/90 – An empirical look at imperialism

Have you heard about “the best kept secret in Framingham”? This has nothing to do with the identity of Madame X. It is… curriculum development, which will give our little kids “multicultural inclusion and pluralistic education.”

I don’t know what all of that means, but I had a dream—or was it a nightmare?—in which I heard a bureaucrat and a teacher discuss this important topic. The bureaucrat spoke first:

Burt: It is important to let our kids know that people do things differently in other parts of the world. When we look at other countries we project our own values, but people abroad do not have to accept and copy the things we do. I am against cultural imperialism in any form. Do you agree with me?

Thelma: I do. Maybe you could give me some idea about how to sensitize children to this issue. It is hard, you know, for children with limited experiences to compare themselves with people of other cultures.

Burt: You are right. Hence we must start out with very simple examples, things that the kids can understand. I had this great idea during breakfast, as I drank my cup of coffee. We tell the kids: Look, in America coffee is a popular drink, while in Argentina and other parts of Latin America “mate” is a popular drink that substitutes for coffee. I bet few of our kids have heard of “yerba mate.”

Thelma: True… but there is a slight problem. Coffee comes from Ethiopia in Africa. The legend has it that an Arab goat-herder noted a strange behavior in his goats when they at the red berries of a bush. Coffee soon became a popular drink in Arabia and a few centuries later was introduced to Europeans. When we drink coffee, we are copying a non-Western culture. We want to stress Western cultural imperialism, and this is not a good example of that.

Burt: You are right. But you see we drink tea, and we copied that from the English. Isn’t that part of our Western cultural heritage?

Thelma: True… but there is a problem with that, too. Team was drunk in China and Japan more than 3,000 years ago. Tea didn’t make it into the West until the 16th century.

Burt: Maybe we could talk about beer. I mean, doesn’t that come from our German ancestors?

Thelma: Not quite. Beer drinking goes back to the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians.

Burt: Well, so we tell the kids that that is where our Western civilization originated.

Thelma: You are stretching things too far. If we claim that ancestry, we have to note that we have discarded most of the beliefs and practices of these ancient civilizations. Take religion, for example, which has been a unifying force in our Western society. Our beliefs are very different from those of Egypt, Sumer, and Babylon.

Burt: I would hate to bring religion into the classroom, but if we need to do so to show our kids how we differ from other people, so be it. They must know about our cultural imperialism, about how we have tried to force on others our religious beliefs.

Thelma: sorry, but I also see a problem with that. We brought into the West the religious beliefs of the Semitic people of the Middle East. The West did not originate the religious ideas that it practices.

Burt: I must say that it is very frustrating to talk to you. All I know is that everybody else in this world is trying to copy us. Take science and mathematics: Are you going to tell me that non-Western people had anything to do with this? (In the penumbra of my dream, the bureaucrat approached the blackboard and wrote down the numbers zero through nine.)

Thelma: Listen to me. Scholarship suggests that the concept of zero originated in India, and it took many centuries before this important concept made it to the West, via the Arabs. Our numerical system is called Arabic for obvious reasons. Neither the Romans nor the Greeks, precursors of Western culture, had algebra, and without algebra it is most difficult to develop higher mathematics. Also, science was not a unique Western development, for the Chinese made many independent scientific discoveries.

Burt: You are not cooperating at all. What the heck are you telling me?

Thelma: Well, in the same way that we copied so many things from foreign cultures, now people abroad are selectively copying things from us. If our kids got to know better who we are, they would suddenly realize our own multicultural background. To be an American is, in plain language, to be a multicultural person.

Then I woke up from my dream. I only hope that others, too, wake up from their dreams.